Untitled Starfell #2 (Starfell #2) - Dominique Valente Page 0,34

not like yew gave me much choice on ’is company or not … but ’e’s weird … Somefink about ’im, I dunno, jes gave me the creeps. Also ’e changes into a huntings bird which tries ter go after fluffy-looking prey like me,’ huffed Oswin from the carpetbag.

Willow looked at the bag and hid a snort. ‘Thank you, Oswin. I didn’t know that. I doubt, though, that Sprig will eat you. And I was asking Feathering actually.’

The dragon seemed to laugh in his wind-chime way, and then he paused and sighed. ‘It’s not a question of “like”, Willow. The kobold is right – the boy is strange. I’m just advising caution.’

Willow frowned. Strange. That wasn’t a good enough reason as far as she was concerned. It felt wrong to mistrust someone just because they were a little different. Wasn’t that exactly how non-magical people treated magic folk?

Most people thought of Willow as odd, but it didn’t give them the right to treat her differently. Sprig might be unusual, but he was trying to help. Look at how he’d saved her from the Brothers of Wol. She frowned. They would see that he meant well.

Essential squeezed her shoulder. ‘I thought he seemed nice.’

Willow turned to her and smiled.

There was a snort from the bag about ‘hags not ’aving much sense when it comes to boys.’

The sound of birdsong interrupted Willow’s thoughts, and she recalled the forest-touched children from the treetop community who had followed them the day before. But when Oswin’s panicked wailings of ‘Oh NO, oh, me greedy aunt Osbertrude!’ reached a deafening crescendo, she twisted round to look and her eyes widened in shock.

These were not children. Before she could blink, they were surrounded by two dozen flying creatures of all shapes and sizes. There were the people with flames for hair, and others with leaves for fingers. There were blue elves and green sprites and wind monkeys, and others that were stranger still, almost as big as the dragon, with horns coming out of their heads, hooves for feet and huge wings. They were all advancing on them fast, with fierce, menacing eyes, some with nostrils flared and others with bows and arrows at the ready.

Willow swallowed. ‘Oh no’ indeed.

15

Forest-touched

Before Willow could gather enough air in her lungs to scream, several of the creatures flew at Feathering.

Willow’s heart started to beat rapidly, and the next thing she knew she was being snatched away by what looked like a woman who was part elk – with large, twisted, dark blue horns on her head and hooves for feet – and part something else entirely, as she had giant blue-green wings.

Willow screamed as she thrashed against the strong horned woman’s grip. ‘LET ME GO!’

She watched in horror as Essential and Sprig found themselves in similar dire straits, Essential dragged off in a net of leaves by one of the leaf-people, and Sprig whisked away by an elf with fierce yellow eyes and a powerful-looking bow.

Feathering roared his fury. ‘What is the meaning of this? Who DARES to attack a dragon?’ His wind-chime voice had turned to the angry howl of a storm, loud and fearsome above the forest. Birds flew in all directions at the noise.

Still the creatures wrestled him from the sky. Willow noticed that one of them, a towering man with midnight skin and green flames for hair, seemed to be flying without the need for wings, powered somehow by air. Together with several wind monkeys and leaf-haired people, they threw what looked like a net made of purple branches over Feathering and dragged him towards the canopy below.

Willow felt her panic begin to mount as the horned woman followed after them. ‘Where are you taking us? Stop it! Leave us alone!’

She could hear Oswin’s similar wailings from the hairy green bag as he was carried away by a small wind monkey with white fur and transparent wings. ‘Oh no! Get off me, yer hairy carbuncle!’

They were carried to a treetop village where those strange, tear-shaped houses hung like odd birdcages, as jewel-bright as the forest itself. Willow and her friends were taken past these homes towards the very top of one of the trees, to a large, open, wooden structure shaped like a star. It looked a bit like a stage or a platform.

To Willow’s relief, the horned woman with the large sea-green wings finally set her down, and she was joined shortly by Sprig and Essential, who were dropped with a thud in the centre of